Today’s technology-savvy student must graduate with a firm understanding of technology, data and data systems, and how both are combined with geospatial information (maps) to make decisions. Jobs are popping up through out the state and nation. In the last year more than 50 full time GIS jobs have been posted in the Upper Peninsula and the future jobs will only grow. GIS jobs can be found in public utilities (which are required to use GIS by 2018) and engineering and drafting companies that are now often required to reference their drawings to the surface of the earth. Job postings are expected to grow until 2020.

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) or Drones (most are technically 'quadcopters') have quickly become the leading method to collect GIS data

Geographic Information Systems is a new science and technology field that is growing fast nationwide. Geographic Information Systems is “the intersection of multiple learning domains (including math, geography, earth science, physics, information systems, computer networking) combined into an engaging interface such as Google Earth or ArcGIS (ArcMap\ArcScene\ArcGlobe). ArcGIS and its open source sister QGIS allow the user to visualize layers of data all on one screen and even in 3D so a deeper knowledge of an issue can be explored. In other words, picture the most “tech savvy team member” of your favorite law enforcement\forensics television show and you have a good starting point for what Geographic Information Systems is all about…all types of data from various several high tech sources all pulled onto a single screen for quick access. Due to the growth of cloud computing and mobile devices (tablets and smartphones) the growth of GIS continues to be explosive and the transfer opportunities continue to grow.

Lab 400 (HATC Bldg) houses our new ArcGIS Advanced Desktop lab. Workstations are Quad Core Intel Xeon processors with high definition graphic capability, 16 Gig of RAM, AMD FirePro video, and use Windows 10 OS. All are running ArcGIS 10.3.1 and students taking the GIS 201 Introduction to GIS course receive a great deal of exposure to the software, data types, and how to present the data in a map or poster. Geographic Information Systems is currently used locally by county governments to plan residential and business expansions, water and wastewater departments to track equipment, forestry to plan forests and harvesting, and even by real estate and investors to decide on where to purchase land to build a business.